6:35 PM,
Aug. 29, 2013

Written by

GEORGE F. WILL

WASHINGTON -- On Oct. 27, 1947, thousands of caskets were unloaded from a ship in New York. The bodies of soldiers from the European theater, writes Rick Atkinson, "then traveled by rail in a great diaspora across the republic for burial in their hometowns." Three young men, killed between the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 and April 1945 in Germany two weeks before the war in Europe ended, were destined for Henry Wright's Missouri farm: ...